Beyond sentential semantic parsing: Tackling the math sat with a cascade of tree transducers

Abstract

We present an approach for answering questions that span multiple sentences and exhibit sophisticated cross-sentence anaphoric phenomena, evaluating on a rich source of such questions – the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). By using a tree transducer cascade as its basic architecture, our system (called EUCLID) propagates uncertainty from multiple sources (e.g. coreference resolution or verb interpretation) until it can be confidently resolved. Experiments show the first-ever results (43% recall and 91% precision) on SAT algebra word problems. We also apply EUCLID to the public Dolphin algebra question set, and improve the state-of-the-art F1-score from 73.9% to 77.0%.